“This is Kate Duffy from Kensington Books,” the voice on the phone said. A few minutes later, Adams was screaming so loudly that her 2½-year-old started to cry. Duffy had offered her a two-book deal. Dark and Dangerous landed in bookstores on June 1 and is a top pick of Romantic Times Book Reviews magazine, and Adams is at work on her second book for Kensington.
As for Wakeman-Linn, she decided that since she was between agents, she’d submit her novel for the biennial Bellwether Prize, founded and funded by bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, author of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The prize is mouthwatering: $25,000 and a contract with a publishing house. Past judges have included Anna Quindlen and Toni Morrison, but the identities of current judges are shielded, presumably to prevent an onslaught of chocolate and tiara deliveries.
In January, a letter arrived at Wakeman-Linn’s home. She’d been named a finalist. She reacted like any sensible novelist would: She called the contest’s organizers to make sure that they’d really sent the letter, that it wasn’t a mistake, and that she, Julie Wakeman-Linn, was truly a finalist. Then she levitated through the ceiling.
The Letdown
At the end of May, the long-awaited e-mail from Maines’ dream agent arrives in her inbox. She holds her breath and clicks it open. It’s a lovely personal note, and the agent thinks Maines is a great writer. But she’s passing on representing Maines’ book, handing it off to a fellow agent.
Maines knew it was unlikely that the first agent she approached would take her on as a client, but she can’t help feeling disappointed. Instead of wallowing though, she makes a decision: she’ll spend the money to have a professional editor review her manuscript. She’ll strengthen it, then start contacting agents again. She’s not giving up.
Wakeman-Linn receives the news that her book didn’t win the Bellwether Prize. But she can’t imagine abandoning her novel. How could she? Over the nearly six years that Wakeman- Linn has been fine-tuning it, there have been times when her thoughts about the book have been so obsessive that she has failed to hear her husband speaking to her.
“He’d say to me, ‘You’re talking to your characters, aren’t you?’ ”Wakeman-Linn says, laughing.
Her book is currently being read by several agents—being a finalist for the Bellwether Prize carries enough clout to make the publishing world take notice—and Wakeman-Linn remains hopeful. “The wonderful thing about writing,” she says, “is the more you write, the better you get.”
Although it seems hard enough to write a book, never mind spending months or years rewriting; most manuscripts require revisions. The more I learn about the publishing industry, the more I find out that it’s normal to rewrite until your fingertips are bruised and the carpal tunnel pain has traveled all the way to your shoulder blades. When my book finally went out to editors, one—who happens to be my dream, pie-in-the-sky editor—comes very close to buying it. Tragically, close only counts in horseshoes, and who cares about a game only Ralph Lauren models play?
I go back to New York and Sanders and I confer over coffee. I take her advice: We’ll pull back the submission while I write a second book. We’ll approach my dream editor again when I have a second manuscript in hand, and we’ll keep hoping. Maybe an editor will fall in love with the second book and want to work with me on revising the first.
Despite the crushing disappointment—I had spent two years on and off working on the book with nothing to show for it— the second book, about the tangled relationship between twin sisters who are leading very different lives, somehow comes easier. I’ve read some books on plotting. I’ve taken an online writing class and met a few critique partners. I became friends with two published novelists, Susan Coll, author of Rockville Pike: A Suburban Comedy of Manners and Acceptance, and Adriana Bourgoin, author of Nine Months in A
ugust. We have encouraged each other and commiserated over lots of sushi at Raku.
The statistics are sobering. Most first books fetch advances of $5,000 to $10,000, and then sink without a trace. And those, perversely, are the success stories. Every year, countless manuscripts are submitted to agents, publishing houses and contests and soundly slapped with a rejection stamp. It’s enough to drive the creative spirit into oblivion.
Except that the creative spirit is much tougher than that. It keeps fighting through the rejections and the rewrites and the long publishing odds that make winning the lottery look realistic.
“As we all wait, the only thing to do is to write something new,” Wakeman-Linn says.
“For most of us, it’s the love of doing it” that keeps us going, Demske agrees.
I’m not sure I’d be able to stop writing even if my next eight books were rejected. This business is glamorous (well, not the part when I’m sitting on my couch in sweat pants, swilling stale coffee and staring down a blank computer screen) and it’s gritty and yes, it’s also heartbreaking. But aren’t most things that are worthwhile in life?
See that guy hunched over his laptop in Starbucks? He believes. So does the woman at the next table over, her eyes glued to her computer screen as she crafts an entire world out of thin air. They aren’t worried about the statistics right now, because they’re hopelessly, gorgeously lost in their imagination, which, as it turns out, is one of the coolest places you can be.
Sarah Pekkanen, a humor columnist for Bethesda Magazine, has written for a number of other publications, including People, Washingtonian, The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.
